Government spies in California church slapped with lawsuit

OPINION:

The Northern California-based Calvary Christian Fellowship — formerly Calvary Chapel San Jose — has slapped Santa Clara County officials with a lawsuit for spying on members during the state’s mandated COVID-related lockdown.

Honestly. The U.S. government, with each passing day, is growing more and more like a China CCP cancer.

This lawsuit — just after learning the FBI spied on Catholics in U.S. churches.

It’s one thing for the government to spy on citizens. We already know from 1975’s congressional investigations, post-Watergate, that the FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies established to protect citizens from enemies, both foreign and domestic, were actually wiretapping, harassing, surveilling and tracking innocent Americans. We already know from Church Committee findings — named after Sen. Frank Church, Democrat from Idaho — the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, in partnership with the NSA, were illegally wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. We already know, too, the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, on the heels of the September 11 terror attacks, have handed these same intel agencies and others considerable powers to dodge accountability with their spy activities — and that abuses have gone forth. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that brought into existence the FISA court has been used, misused and regularly misused in recent times by government officials who have abused their positions for political causes.

“The chief judge of a secretive surveillance court said … the FBI provided ‘unsupported’ information when it applied to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign adviser and directed the bureau to report back by next month on what steps it was taking to fix the problems,” The Associated Press reported in December, 2019.

We already know all this.

We already know we can’t trust our own intelligence agencies.

They’ve been outed for alarming behavior; they’ve been chastised, criticized, condemned, threatened, investigated, subjected to congressional hearing after hearing after hearing. And yet there they stand. There they operate.

There they go, off and running on the next secret and illegal mission.

They’re coming for the church-goers of America next, it seems.

And this is where it gets really chilling. To return to the original point: It’s one thing for government to spy on citizens. It’s another thing entirely for government to spy on church attendees — to actually infiltrate the churches and send in the spies and track the whereabouts of congregants.

“Attorneys with Advocates for Faith and Freedom filed the lawsuit on behalf of [the church] for utilizing what they say was a form of geo-tracking while the church remained open under COVID-19 pandemic restrictions,” The Christian Post wrote.

The church’s pastor, Mike McClure, refused to abide and obey the government’s ridiculously non-scientific, random and targeted lockdown orders — and for that, suffered. Gov. Gavin Newsom, already chastised by the U.S. Department of Justice for targeting churches for closures while allowing other places of business to remain open, at one point even called for caution among church-goers because he said their singing could spread COVID.

First Amendment, anyone?

If Congress can’t make a law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, then certainly a government bureaucrat can’t close a house of worship — a place where religion is exercised — based on dictate, order, boot stomp to the face.

Yet across America, during COVID, this is what occurred. Churches bowed to government, congregants cowered in the corners and the very places where people most needed to be for comfort, for encouragement, for direction and guidance — they closed. They shut their doors, shamefully and sadly. They failed the population; religious leaders, by and large, failed in their biblical duties to preach the word, no matter the opposition.

But not all.

McClure, and a handful of others, stood up to the government bullies and kept on keeping on with their preaching of the word. They kept on despite being hit with restraining orders and court injunctions and fines for, get this, the crime of holding church services. Apparently, in McClure and his Calvary congregation case, they got surveilled, too.

“The complaint contends that the ‘geofencing operation was not neutral and generally applicable because not all businesses and entities were subject to surveillance,’” Christian Post wrote. “Additionally, the county never obtained a warrant to conduct such operations on church members, the court filing maintains.”

If this evil attack on America’s churches doesn’t come to an end, it won’t be long before the entire concept of American Exceptionalism — the idea that rights come from God, not government — is swept to the side and big, bigger, biggest boot-stomping bureaucracy becomes a permanent fixture of American politics.

There is no way to maintain individualism over collectivism if the rights and liberties of individuals are handed to the government to dole.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE  or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.